


Concurrent

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Constant Reminders of Gansey's Impending Death, Elements of Horror, Gansey's Impending Death, M/M, Noah's Spooky Ghost Stuff, POV Second Person, non-linear time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 10:38:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6371512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gansey is awake, leafing through his journal without actually reading it. He already had a page on the ley line and apparitions. He added your name, then underlined it, then crossed it out, then pressed his head into his hands while his chest heaved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Concurrent

**Author's Note:**

> I had two failed attempts at writing this before this version haa it's not my only Noah headcanon but it's a lot of what I love about my dead son. 
> 
> Beta read by [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) even though she's trying to popularise "son of a meme and son of a memer."

At the same time as your best friend is bashing your skull in with your skateboard, a boy is dying, hundreds of miles away. You stand over him and watch. You see the hundred stings bleeding poison into him, and you feel every crunch of your head caving in, and around you both is magic, cold and dormant.

You die. He lives.

 

You wait seven years for him to come to Henrietta, and it takes no time at all.

 

You meet Gansey on his first day at Aglionby, invisible in your uniform and the crowd, invisible because no one wants to know you anymore. There are familiar names thrown around, younger brothers, cousins, gilded surnames that stick in your brain like nails. Seven years meant nothing to Aglionby, not when the school prides itself on tradition, when ‘values’ means the ability to never change. If not for the slimmer phones, you wouldn’t be sure time ever moved at all.

You thought you knew who you were looking for; a ten year old dying in summer, a seventeen year old dead in the rain. Something between them. You thought you were familiar with Gansey, because you know what he looks like extinguished.

But the Gansey you meet is beyond what you could have expected. He has taken your life and draped himself in it, he is broad-chested and strong-armed and gleaming with money and knowledge and the power of youth. He looks so much more than you ever did. A pang shoots through you, something that could be jealousy, could be grief, could be anything that leaves you feeling empty.

It seems impossible that he could look at you. It seems like everything about him has been engineered to make you more of a ghost. But he does; he sees you through the orientation crowd, and it takes him a long time to extricate himself from the crush of his courtiers out to where you wait. He regards you with a cocked head and curiosity, like he knew you once and forgot your name. “Have we met?” he asks.

“No,” you tell him, and put out a hand. He takes it, and lightning licks your palm, bites down hard somewhere in the heart of you. You wonder if it’s your own life, recognising you. “I’m Noah.”

“Gansey,” he says, and you know there must be more to it than that, you heard the distant screams of _Richard_ for the ten year old boy, but he doesn’t offer anything else. It’s the Aglionby way. He’s going to fit in. He smiles at you, all welcoming white teeth and genuinely kind eyes, and he asks, “Do you know anything about ley lines?”

Your heart doesn’t beat anymore; your pulse is energy, and not even your own. You can feel it in Gansey too, a low current underscoring the one running through you. You just smile back.

 

Possibly, Gansey thinks you spoke to Ronan about moving into Monmouth. Ronan definitely thinks you spoke to Gansey about it. They were used to you turning up after school, they were used to you staying late into the night, and it was the easiest thing in the world, to just not leave. You like Monmouth, and having a world broader than Aglionby and the inside of your own head. It’s a careless, wonderful place, and it suits the boys that inhabit it, and you want it to suit you, too. With them, you think, you’re a little more alive.

Ronan has magic, his own brand, fierce and burning and completely one-sided. It’s all his will and his way with no need for reciprocity, and you’re hungry for a taste of it, to know what magic is when you can just _take_ without having to sacrifice in return. His dreams are turbulent energy that play havoc with you, pulling and pulling until your fingertips are milk white and bloodless and you begin to forget things, but you love them, you love him, you love what he creates.

Sometimes you steal the things he brings back, in the moments before he’s fully awake and realises what he’s holding. You fill your room with dream things, and no one notices the spaces among them where you should keep books and clothes. 

Sometimes you go to meet him in Cabeswater. Even though the woods at night are a playground for horrors, you endure it with your shoulders in a defensive hunch and the knowledge that nothing really bad can happen to you anymore. You meet his horrors. You meet his dreams. You meet him, though he thinks you’re his invention, though your Latin is clumsier than any of his other creations. You never really learned the language; you could copy off your friend.

 

Sometimes, in Cabeswater, you find hornets and a ten year old boy rasping out his last, terrified breath. You feel the first hit to the side of your head, stumble with the blow, watch wasps crawl beneath the boy’s glasses to settle on his open eyes, feel the warmth of the blood pouring down the side of your face, pool in the hollow of your cheek.

You leave Cabeswater and go to Gansey and he’s seventeen and still alive, thrashing in his bed, hands clasped desperately over his ears as he shakes and fights the memory. You set your cool hands over his, press your forehead against his, feel the current flow between you both. Your chest moves slow and sedate and totally superfluous, and his heart is a manic buzz of tiny, furious wings. You stay like that until he stills.

“Noah,” he says, too ragged, too fallible, too burdened with the night. “Sorry. Did I wake you?”

“No,” you tell him, because you don’t sleep. You pick his glasses off the floor, offering them up, and he slides them back on. He’s exhausted and sweaty, coming down from a very hard edge, so close to you in the moonlight. His glasses are a different pair to what the boy wore, but they still change him. He won’t be wearing them the next time he dies. The next time he dies, you won’t have anything to offer. You run your cold fingers over his face and he leans into you with a breathless exhale, still a king even now.

His breath is warm on your face, and you wonder if any part of it is still yours.

 

You’re in Cabeswater the first time they all go, but you aren’t with them. You aren’t anything but another voice in the chorus of the trees, only awake in response to the call, Blue’s energy, Ronan’s energy, Gansey. They find the hollow tree. You know what they see.

You know now, with hindsight and Cabeswater flooding your veins, what Whelk saw. Why he couldn’t look at you, after. Why, when the time came, he didn’t have to hesitate.

 

You sit with them at Nino’s, and help them with homework assignments that haven’t changed in seven years, and wait for them to get sick of your not eating and divvy your share of the pizza up between them.

You listen to them talk about Whelk. He’s a joke to them. They mock his name and his manners and how obviously terribly his life has gone. You listen, and in another booth on the other side of Nino’s – always the one under the front window – you’re eating a pizza with Whelk, greedily stealing one of his slices while he’s distracted by iced tea. He flips you off, and you laugh around a mouthful of warm, cheesy grease. It’s real and good on your tongue, and you watch Ronan eat your quarter of the pizza with a low, jealous hunger.

You don’t think ghosts can get hungry, but there’s a chasm in you, and it’s desperate for something.  

 

The Pig breaks down when it’s just you and Gansey, and he goes out to look at it without asking you for help. No one expects much from you, because you’re absent too much, too tired, too afraid, too dead. But you remember being alive, too; sleeping and following and still doing so little. Maybe you wasted it. Maybe that’s why you lost it.

You watch through the windshield as Gansey puts the hood up, and see his shoulders drenched with rain, see his friends standing shattered around him, everything muddy and broken, death bearing down with permanence. Grief takes you all like an earthquake, and the world splits around the place where Gansey had been.

There’s a shiver in space, and then you’re not in the car. Water races down your face, but you don’t mind the feel of it as you circle the hood and get Gansey back in sight. He’s still alive, still puzzling over the treacherous heart of his car. The Camaro’s had this problem before, or it will have it again, and you know how Adam solves it so you can solve it now. Gansey stares as you reach past him into the engine, but surprise melts into gratitude. Sincerity always looks good on him.

“Thank you, Noah,” he says, and he says your name like no one else ever has, stirring something hazy and warm in your stomach. “I didn’t know you were good with cars?”

“Adam showed me that,” you say, because it’s close enough to true and because you’re sure Gansey will never ask. You wonder if Adam would like your car. You did, you think. You loved it. You wonder if it could still run.

“You’re very good to have around,” Gansey tells you. He says it in the way that means a lot of things, though you don’t know what any of them are. You hear an echo of Whelk’s voice in his, the same words, the crueller twist, the implication that somehow he’s saying exactly what you mean to him. But Gansey reaches over and pushes your hair back on your forehead, and you look at his rain streaked face, see him flicker dead and alive and dead again. There’s magic enough in the world, you know. There must be enough for him. 

                                      

The next time they go to Cabeswater, you go with them, too content to sit in the mix of them and their bright pulses to concern yourself with the destination. For the drive out, you are _present_ , Blue’s knee digging into yours, Gansey craning his head back every half dozen miles to check on you, Ronan telling jokes that he knows only you find funny. You feel the stuffy air in the car around you, force it into your lungs, feel pleased and young and alive. You don’t worry about where you’re going. You don’t notice the path they’re taking to the woods.

But they go _there_.

You know where you are before the car has even stopped. The memory of last time muddies your reality, and for a second you’re not sure how many people are in the car – four others, or just one? - and then you blink and you’re wedged in the back seat of the Camaro next to Blue. You pile out with the rest of them, and the summer heat is stifling, you exhale until your lungs are empty and you don’t breathe in again. Around you the woods are speaking, asking you what you’re doing, asking you if you’ve forgotten. There’s a pen in your hands, so you can take notes, but you flex your fingers and then they’re empty.

Someone calls “Noah,” and someone calls, “Czerny,” and you follow them both, heart in your throat, rubbing your bruised, intact cheek and trying to remember what the present is. For a moment you get lost, following a dark-haired shadow along the stream, tame and alive, skateboard loose in your grip.

“What are you doing?” Blue demands, not unkindly, and takes you by the hand. She floods you with energy, with _her_ and with reality, and you walk with her through the seasons. It’s much easier to focus with her hand in yours, a new detail, an anchor, and you squeeze her fingers gratefully. She glances at you sideways, like she doesn’t understand, but she allows it and that’s enough.

You’re pleased that the trees like her, that the trees like all your friends. You’ve spent years with them. Ronan offers a greeting, experimental, and the trees chorus their own, friendly, welcoming, and their rustling tickles your ears, resonates through you.

Gansey asks, “Does anyone else hear that?”

The others all shake their heads, and you stare. You’d thought _Adam_ would have been able to, and then you think maybe he can’t because he’s deaf, and then you remember that he’s not deaf at all, he’s just a boy staring warily at the magic around him, shoulders hunched against a future that’s yet to hit. You tell Gansey, “I can hear them, too.”

You’ve always been able to hear them. It infuriated Whelk, that you had a connection with _his_ woods, that you had to poorly relay their Latin to him for translation. At the time you didn’t know why they knew you. At the time, the familiar way their words trickled through you was unsettling. Now you lay a fond hand on one trunk and Whelk says, “Czerny, what did they _say?_ ” and you know just enough Latin that you know you want to keep this message to yourself.

“What did they _say_ , Gansey?” someone demands, and you tick back into the present, to the bitter set of Gansey’s mouth. He’d asked something about Glendower. You were the only other one who heard the answer, but everyone can tell what it was.

The trees tell the others to press on through the seasons. You’d like to tell the trees to stop, to give any other direction, to keep the others _away_. Your Latin was never that good. You trail along after them on a very familiar path, and you pass yourself again and again, the skateboard in your hand, the dull sense of summer so heavy around you.

He’d seen it in the dreaming tree. He hadn’t hesitated. There’s an insect’s hum, and you stumble with the first hard crack across your cheek.

“Noah?” Gansey says, and you realise you stopped walking, that the others are getting ahead. His hand is on your shoulder, effortlessly warm. There are hornets in his ears. He smiles, and there’s a wasp crawling over his teeth. He says, “I think we should trust the trees. They’ll get us out, after whatever they want us to see,” and he’s speaking about something that’s happening a world away from where you are.

You nod. You let him help you back upright, and you follow him back to where you parked seven years ago. Just an hour ago you were alive, you were in a car full of your friends and you thought you could give warmth as well as consume it, and now you’re facing your Mustang, the pollen and debris that built up on it while you were nowhere. Sometimes you like to pretend you’re still alive. Today you feel yourself decay.

You retch emptily among the trees, bring up nothing but the taste of bile and the memory of food. You find that you’re shaking, rubbing your eyes and you imagine yourself disintegrate. Ronan and Blue haul you back. Gansey looks at you and gnaws his lip with worry, but there’s nothing you can say. You already told him you were dead. He took it as a joke he didn’t understand.

Your eyes unfocus, and then Gansey’s holding a bloody skateboard, and you turn away to gag again. 

 

You’re not there when they find your bones. You’re barely anything at all, after they’ve moved them.

 

“ _Noah_ ,” Gansey demands, and it’s a demand, so you go. You stand in the doorway to your room, and he and Adam and Ronan all stare, like you’re an eerie, frightening thing, like you’re anything other than what you said you were. They’re trying to work you out – why you don’t pay rent, why you don’t go to class, why they don’t _know_ you. They’re trying to understand how you could have been dead this long without their noticing.

You don’t want to talk about it. You shiver in your doorway, and it’s everything you can do to stay. Without Blue, and with your bones off the line, you feel like you’re blurry around the edges, more the impression of a person than a real thing. You don’t quite fit in with Monmouth right now, not with all of them, so firmly real. You feel like a bad green screen effect.

“Noah,” Gansey says, softer. “You’ve been missing seven years.”

You shrug. He’s already put it together. Somewhere on the line you’re dying, and so is he.

“Is this,” he asks, and the words are choking him, guilt so unnatural on a Gansey, “because of me?”

“It’s not,” you say. It’s because you died, but he didn’t kill you. The room around you is starting to fill with insects, crawling over Adam and Ronan, filling Gansey’s ears. “It’s not your fault.”

Stings are rising up on his skin, but he doesn’t react. At his feet, water and mud and blood pool, thick and black on the floorboards. He asks, “Who killed you?”

Your head cracks to the left, and your mouth is full of teeth and blood and you can’t talk.

 

You go to him later. Adam’s in your room, Ronan’s asleep, and Gansey is awake, leafing through his journal without actually reading it. He already had a page on the ley line and apparitions. He added your name, then underlined it, then crossed it out, then pressed his head into his hands while his chest heaved.

You settle on the bed beside him, put an icy hand on his shoulder. There’s not much of you, but there’s enough. He’s not a battery like Blue, but he’s still drawing from the same river you are, you can still relax into the current between you. And right now, he eclipses you; he is the moon dictating your tide, he is the ebb and flow of you, pulling you along in the wake of his overwhelming gravity. It’s easy just to be near him.

“I wish I could fix this,” he says. He doesn’t look at you. The raw, desperate need in his voice grates against his throat, and you curl around him, a freezing spectre clinging to his warmth. He hugs you back, and his hold is enveloping, something you could disappear in. “I’m so sorry, Noah.”

“It’s okay,” you tell him, not sure if you’re lying. “I’ve been dead a while. I’m used to it.”

He gives you a look that says very firmly that it is _not_ okay, and then he pulls back, rubs his eyes and sighs with all his frustrated exhaustion. You put your thumb in the furrow of his forehead, to smooth out the creases, and he stares at you, so fragile. This is the Gansey that grew out of the boy, and this is the Gansey that you are going to lose. He traces his fingers over the crumbling bones in your cheek, and you hear the buzz echo from inside his ears. He asks, “Is there anything I can do for you? Is there anything you want?”

You want him to live. You want him to have never died in the first place. You want to have been alive and at school when he was, to live at Monmouth with him and Ronan, to not know so many terrible things. You say, “I want to stay like this a while.”

He lies back on his bed with you. You can see gooseflesh rising where he touches you, but he keeps his arms around you anyway. He touches your wrist, feels for a pulse, and you let him, let him drag his journal closer and scrawl something down. His breath on you is so warm. You can’t remember when you stopped breathing.

It’s easier to close your eyes and pretend your heart is beating in time with his, that it’s tracking the seconds you spend together and not counting down.

 

You lose so much of yourself, with your bones off the line. Rot eats away the very heart of you, and you forget too many things, follow Whelk through the trees, follow Gansey, get torn apart by night horrors that buzz like hornets. You break things in Monmouth just to _touch_ , you smash a plant, you claw Ronan, you reach out so desperately for proof you’re still real.

It’s hard to believe that you were ever more than one of Cabeswater’s ghosts. You’re afraid you’ll be something different soon. You’re afraid you’re something different now.

 

They go to your funeral, and then they go to your second funeral, their heads bowed over your bones. The church has always creeped you out; it’s where you’re buried. But they press you back into the earth, put you securely in Cabeswater’s embrace, and then you are as much as you ever were.

You try to be grateful. You’re glad you’re not dead. You’re glad you’re not alive. But being restored as a ghost isn’t a relief. In the pit of you, you don’t know what you want to be.

At least you have friends to pile in around you, who don’t care that sometimes you’re nothing, and at best you’re not really much, who let you steal their heat and their energy and pull you along with the fierce rhythm of their lives.

 

Gansey’s the one who makes you a grave marker behind the church. You already have a tombstone, and it’s strange to you, that he’s the one who dies twice and you’re the one who gets two graves. You watch him place it over your bones, just your name and two dates and the word ‘ _Remembered_ ’. You think that if it wasn’t for you, he’d have a stone with the same dates, and you feel strangely brittle. Your death wasn’t anything to do with him, really. It’s only chance.

He doesn’t notice you’re watching until he’s finished with your unofficial grave, covered with dirt and dripping with sweat. “Noah,” he says, surprised and pleased, carelessly wiping his hands on his khakis. You wonder what you would have done with seven more years. You think of all Gansey’s done with them. “Do you mind?”

“No,” you say, drifting forward, “It’s nice.” You already know he’s going to tend it. He’ll bring you flowers and keep the moss off, polish the stone and make sure _remembered_ means something.

He picks wildflowers from the underbrush. You don’t warn him about insects, because it doesn’t happen here, and it doesn’t happen like this. He glances at you, as though suddenly self-conscious, as he lays them in front of the stone. They’re blue and yellow, fragile and pretty. You like them.

Carefully, you reach up, stroke his cheek like you’re trying to wipe away rain or mud or ease the stings, and he mirrors you, thumb smooth over your broken cheek. It comes away red, and it comes away clean, and you sigh and close your eyes because it’s easier than looking at his cracked glasses. In the distance, someone screams _Richard_ , and you wrap your arms around his neck like that can save you from having to let go.

Gansey puts a hand under your chin, tips your head back for him to kiss, and everything is his warmth. You inhale his breath, curling heat in your empty lungs, and you hold it. You kiss him back, and you can’t think of a moment when you’ve never loved Gansey.

You’ve given him seven of your years and you need a way to give him more, to press all your scattered moments into hands and let him exist everywhere, as ubiquitous as the woods. He’s all the _more_ you’ve never been, and you waited seven years for him to find you, and you’ve been waiting seven years for him to die, and it all tumbles through you, a chaotic mess of everything you never wanted to know. Your grave is new and gleaming; your grave is mossy and buried. Your head cracks to the left with the first impact, and Gansey holds you, doesn’t let you go.

He says, “We’ll find Glendower. Everything will be okay,” and his mouth is full of mud and wasps, until you blink and he’s fine and he’s alive, alive, and smiling. 

There’s magic enough in the world for you, for Adam and Ronan and Blue. You need there to be enough for him.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, I'd love to know what you thought!! I also have a [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
